 This 10th year of Daily Tech News show is made possible by you listening right now. Thanks to every single one of you. Paley Glendale, Dr. X 17, Adam Green and Mark Olson on this episode of DTNS unity backtracks on developer fees. But how far we don't know yet iOS 17 is here and it means apps can read you the weather in your own voice. Do you want that? Plus Chris Mancini talks about how crowdfunding has changed over the years. This is the Daily Tech News for Monday, September 18th, 2023 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt deep in the heart of Texas. I'm Justin Robert Young. I'm the show's producer Roger Chang and joining us writer, podcaster Chris Mancini. Welcome back to Daily Tech News show, Chris. Thanks. Great to be here. You know, never run out of tech things to talk about apparently. No, every time I think we're going to do. Yeah, every time I think we're going to cancel the show. Yeah, there's more. Yeah, turns out. I that is one of the weird things of doing this show for almost 10 years now is that I know I always have more things than I can fit in a show that I want to talk about. And you think that I would have gotten more jaded than that. Nope, you're just another earnings report. No earnings reports today, though, folks, but let's find out what is in the quick hits. Intel continues to grow its business as a foundry that will make chips for anybody. You can pay them, they'll make a chip for you and in pursuit of that goal, it's promoting its development of glass as a substrate for chips. Now, glass is brittle. It's a little harder to work with, but Intel thinks they've figured it out. And the benefit is that glass can tolerate higher temperatures, resist warping and allow for some more precise lithography. You can put more chiplets on it without the instability of silicon. That gives you some more flexibility and design. Intel says its glass substrate can increase interconnect density by 10 with higher yields. The glass substrate announcement comes with a side of ramping up on packaging of chips at US foundries. That's something TSMC has had trouble with. It still sends its chips from its Arizona plants to Taiwan for packaging. Amazon will hold a device and services event Wednesday, September 20th at its campus near Washington DC. It will not be streamed, so this is strictly for attending press. Bloomberg notes that it will also be Amazon executive Dave Limps sign-off. As Amazon continues to cut development money from products like the Echo, Limp told employees last month that he will be leaving the company before the end of the year. And do we think we know who's going to replace him, Tom? Yeah, we do. There's actually lots of Microsoft news to throw it your way today. But the big one is that chief product officer and Windows lead Panos Panai announced he's leaving Microsoft three days before this Thursday's September 21st, Microsoft hardware and AI event. So we have Amazon on the 20th. We have Microsoft on the 21st. Microsoft told the Verge that Panai will not appear at that event, despite Panai posting last month that he was excited to be there. Yusef Mady will take over Windows and Surface. And Bloomberg reports that Panai is headed to Amazon to take over its smart device division from Limp. So, you know, echoes and speakers and displays and all that. I'm very curious if we'll see Panai at Amazon. September 20th event. Like I said, there's the I was going to say, what was the pitch there? It's like, what was the pitch there? We're going to gut this department now. Come in and run it. We gutted it. Limps it. But hey, maybe you can do something with one. Yeah, yeah. I don't know. I had other Microsoft news researchers at security company with notified Microsoft June 22nd that he shared access signature token and SAS token for a GitHub repository. Was overly permissive. It turns out with a little persuasion, you can get it to do whatever you want, include exposed internal data. Microsoft revoked the token June 24th. No customer data was exposed. This is a good news story of security company finds vulnerability gets a patch before it gets exploited and internal emails continue to be revealed as part of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission's appeal of Microsoft's win in its bid to acquire Activision Data. Microsoft's win in its bid to acquire Activision Blizzard. Among those tidbits, Microsoft has unsurprisingly been working on streaming PC games through Xbox cloud. It only does Xbox games now. Activision executives met last December with Nintendo to discuss the next version of the Nintendo switch. And there's a lot of stories showing you all the emails about how Microsoft reacted to the PS5 announcement if you want to see those. Twitter alternative T2 has renamed itself Pebble. The company is now using the Icelandic top level domain. I is which lets its change T2 user names to the format of Pebble dot is slash username. And it's using a bit of generative AI to help you write posts offering suggestions based on what you've posted about before info on your bio and who to follow. Pebble is not letting me sign up because every time I tried to create a username, it would redirect me back to login. Pebble is a real pain. It was today. In 2020, during lockdowns, Google added support for Zoom and its own Google Meet video conferencing service to the Nest Hub Max smart display. Now it's taken both those away. Support for Google Meet on the Nest Hub Max will end September 28th and support for Zoom will end on September 30th. Now in somewhat related news, Apple TV got its new OS today and Apple TV 4k now supports FaceTime and later this year will support WebEx and Zoom. So you can stop using your Nest Hub Max and start using an Apple TV if you want. That uses the iPhone or iPad as a camera. And fun. Yeah, it is fun. That's exactly what it is. All right, it is fair to say that Unity has taken a firestorm of, I'd call it hate from developers after announcing last Tuesday that it would change how it charges developers to account for each time a game is installed. First, Unity clarified that it would only charge for initial installs. Charities would be exempt and demos wouldn't count. Unity also said subscription services would be required to pay the fee, not developers in cases of things like Xbox Game Pass. However, the company is now backtracking more. Unity posted on X. We have heard you. We apologize for the confusion and angst, the runtime fee policy we announced on Tuesday caused. We are listening, talking to our team members, community, customers and partners. And we'll be making changes to the policy. We will share an update in a couple of days. Thank you for your honest and critical feedback. Now in gadget captured a representative post about the feelings of developers written by the falconer Dev Tomas Sala on X quote, put years and years of work into my pipeline. I did so under a simple per seat license. I am happy to pay. Now, while I'm close to release, they spring something new on me, not a price increase, but a fundamental change in how we do business together. I have no options. I can't go back. I can only bend and pay up. So Tom, where we at here? Yeah. The apology reads at first a little like we're sorry you got mad, but it does say they're going to make changes. Doesn't say what those changes are going to be. Sounds like what devs would like is a change back to the per seat policy. And I think at this point they'd understand an increase in that. But obviously what unity looked at was we need to make more money. You know, and that's not unusual. I don't think devs are upset at unity for needing to make up some losses right now in this economy. It's just the way they fundamentally changed the terms of the deal. And it angered people. But unity seems to think that or at least the thought that just increasing the per seat license or lowering the qualification or something wasn't enough to make this work. I'm very curious what they come up with later this week because short of that short of just going back to the old policy at a higher price, I'm not sure anything they do is going to make developers less angry. Well, every developer, I mean, I mean every company has one of those apology letters kind of is like a boilerplate. Yeah, something kind of happens. They literally sound exactly the same from every single, especially the tech companies. So and you're right. It starts off with like, we're sorry you got mad. Not that we did anything wrong, you know, but we're sorry you got mad. But yeah, I mean, you've got developers that are halfway into something and then you're going to change the rules. I can see why people aren't happy. Yeah, there are two things that I think are really at play here that lead to the reaction that we've seen. Number one, it's not just raising revenue. It's who this revenue is going to disproportionately affect and it is really at the heart of indie games for which use the unity engine disproportionately because it's a good engine. The second part of this is what Chris just mentioned. There is a timeline for putting out something that needs to be at an increasing level of quality or polish in indie games. It's a very saturated market where you have a lot of brilliant people that are putting their heart and soul into these items. And if at a late stage, if not having it already out, all of a sudden the entire calculations that you've done for a business model are flipped up on its head. Well, then then you're going to have a problem as for solutions. I think that if you were going to make a change like this, this is a, I mean, I would almost say at least six months, if not maybe years of a runway for people to understand that this change is coming. Yeah. I think that the biggest problem really isn't the change to me. It's the fact that they didn't bring developers on board to it because the unity terms up until now have been very generous. When unity first announced the, like you can use it for free up to, I think it's a million downloads and then you had to start to pay the per seat license. It was considered to be a big boon. It was very developer friendly and it's always easy to be generous in the good times. Yes. The good times go away. It's always difficult because the good times go away for, for everybody at the same time. And so you need to do extra work to bring developers along. It feels to me like unity was a little impatient and was like, well, we need to do this now. Well, there, there's, there's two ways that you can do it, right? You can try to include all the stakeholders and let it be a slow motion train wreck or you hope to rip off the bandaid and hope that it's a very loud, but fast train wreck. And it turns out they got both. Whoops. Way to thread the needle. Yeah. They, they, they, the CEOs of unity and reddit are going to be having some nice drinks together soon. Lots of Apple news today. Morgan Stanley says its research indicates iPhone 15 pre-orders are stronger than expected, though the long lead times are partially attributable to supply constraints. But, but it's mostly good news. The price of repairing the back glass for the iPhone 15 pro has gone down. It'll be $169 for the pro and $199 for the pro max. That's quite a bit less than it is for the 14 where it's $499 for the pro and $549 for the pro max. Tim Cook told CBS this morning that he watched an entire season of Ted Lasso on an Apple vision pro. And that's what all the headlines of that conversation were about. Apple vision pro, of course the headset coming out next year. Cook says he uses it every day, which I imagine he does because he has to. It's his job. Kind of his job, right? Yeah, exactly. The most relevant news to iPhone users though is the release of iOS 17. It is out now. I just finished installing it. It comes with improved auto correct virtual call screening, which yes, Google Pixar users. I know you've had this for years. It is cool. Another thing you've had is interactive home screen widgets. iOS users get that now too. Standby mode can turn your phone into a smart display. And there's an accessibility feature that can clone your voice. So you could train it on recordings of your voice and provide your voice in case that you have lost your voice. It could be used by anybody though. And it's being used by the weather app. Carrot. If you don't know, Carrot. Offers you description settings. You can have it give the normal boring weather descriptions or you can set levels of snarkiness up to one that they're like, you know, basically on the edge of offensive descriptions of the weather. And Carrot in this new version will be able to read the weather to you in your own voice. So let me get this straight. You could, this app will not only tell you the weather in your own voice, but you could make it a snarkier version of yourself telling you the weather. I mean, it depends on how snarky you are. If it's snarkier, but yes, yes, that's the idea. It's called overkill personality. Carrot will sometimes make creative use of profanity in her forecasts. Yeah, you know. This doesn't sound like a waste of time at all. Yeah, Carrot is a fun app. It actually got me thinking though about the idea of voices because we spent a lot of time talking about the iconic voices of Siri and the Amazon Echo's voice. But it makes me wonder, is the future of us talking to computers, us talking to ourselves? And is that going to be less friction or more friction in terms of you processing that you're talking to a computer? It's a great question. I mean, I just assumed everything was going to sound like Hal, you know, at one point. But, you know, we're way beyond that now. They also do celebrity voices on Carrot. And I feel like that's what more people would opt for. Because I don't know that most of us want to hear ourselves. You know, the old cliche is like, oh, I hate the sound of my own voice. Although a lot of people do love the sound of their own voice. So maybe this would be perfect. Yes, make for yourself, dork. I think a lot of people will try this. It's a great press release for Carrot to get people to talk about it. And the target demo is probably podcasters. Yes, exactly. 100% of podcasters will use this. But most sane people will actually just switch it to, you know, Julia Roberts or something. Yeah, but why? I mean, I think when people say they don't like hearing their own voice, it wraps into a lot of things about public speaking and being embarrassed and having people judge you. But this is not that. And I'm imagining a world where my own voice replaces Siri, for example. If that creates less of a friction in my own brain because it feels like I'm literally just having a conversation with myself in my own head, which I do often, then maybe it makes it more frictionless for me to get more done. And ultimately, that's the goal of all of these systems. I hadn't thought about the conversation in your own head. But I was going with the like, you don't normally speak to yourself out. I guess people do talk to themselves out loud. But, you know, when you're, when you want to talk to something else, you want it to sound different, to distinguish it from yourself. When I say these things out loud, they all sound like very psychologically fraught. Well, they are. And I do think that this is a very, very interesting question because a lot of those assumptions are made in a world before we had the technology to accurately replicate our own voice. So let's imagine that it's, you know, not only your own voice, but maybe your voice but calmer. Maybe it's your voice, but more confident. Like all these things that we can do with machine learning. And I'm assuming that's what it's happening on on device. Yeah. 15 minutes of training on the iPhone. Yeah. I don't know, folks. I want to hear feedback on DailyTechNewShow.com one way or the other. Whether you like this, hate it or otherwise, what would you want to do this? Whether you're going to do it or not. And if you do it, how it goes for you. I would like to hear that as well. It might drive you crazy. You might actually go into it. Yeah. You're going to be chastised by your own voice. I mean, with the weather. I mean, it's, it's a lot of weird things. What is Karen saying to me? Yeah. Karen says, if the word feedback hurts your feelings, boy, do I have some feed forward for you. That's what it says about my weather right now. That's nothing to do with the weather. Anyway, speaking of feedback, that's our email address. Feedback at DailyTechNewShow.com. All right, Chris. Let's talk crowdfunding. Absolutely. You have crowdfunded many projects. How long have you been crowdfunding projects now? Oh, probably, um, close to eight years or so ish, maybe closer to 10. I lose track because it was, you know, multiple companies and different things that we did. I've done everything from like books to a podcast festival to a documentary feature film. So it's been, it's been a lot. And it's definitely seen a lot of change over the years, for sure. How, how has that changed for you? Because you were mentioning to me that you think, you feel like there has been a sea change in what people assume from the operator side of crowdfunding. Definitely. Like a lot of times like the crowdfunding was like, just to get something made or like a proof of concept where I can't really afford to make this. But then when I do it, then I want to go through the old gatekeeper system of like trying to get it picked up as a book or, you know, a movie or something like that, whatever you had actually made comics, whatever, which I've been doing a lot of now is graphic novels. But the what's been happening is a lot more tools are being added where you don't really have to do that anymore where it's an, it's a means to, it's not a means to an end anymore. It is actually an end product where people can just back and buy indie products right from the crowdfunding. And there's more tools available now to create ease for like people running campaigns to get rewards to backers and all of these things. So it becomes more of like a decision like, well, do I want to deal with the bigger companies at all? Or I have enough tools now because everything has evolved to kind of avoid it completely. And the other component to that is the consumers. Like, you know, crowdfund, no one knew what that was, you know, a decade ago, but now consumers are getting more savvy. Like, well, I want an indie comic book. I'm going to look on Kickstarter first or I'm going to Indiegogo or if I want to look at for independent film or something new or different, that's not in one of the, in the big companies. And a lot of times the companies do pick up the indie books anyway, but it's not like, oh, if I don't get this picked up, we're done. It's not that way anymore. There's an audience there just for indie products and they're going to go to crowdfunding sites to fulfill them. So what are some of those tools that you're talking about that have made that easier, where instead of saying, I'll make this movie with the Kickstarter funds and then hope I get a distribution deal that you can just say, like, hey, I'm making this comic book, this movie, and that's it. I'm selling it to my crowd. Yeah, pretty much. And one of the things is kind of like these little helper companies that have cropped up like BackerKit where, you know, it helps you give away rewards or there's like shipping companies like that help you kind of get the rewards out and help you with the postage. But most importantly now, there's a lot more digital distribution where you could have a comic book and you could get it on Kindle. You could get it on Drive Through Comics. You could get it in all these places or Global Comics where it's really tailored more for indie where the big companies have their stuff on there too, but people go there to browse and see what's different and new that's not on the big companies kind of libraries. Is there some cross-pollination? Yes, and there should be. Like sometimes big companies do kickstarters and the other way around or sometimes I think Neil Gaiman did a kickstarter for Good Omen is the graphic novel and it like almost like broke the Internet. I mean, it did so well. So you've got indie creators. You've got creators that have been working with studios or publishers for years and it's all it's all mixed together, which is great because it helps, you know, all of the indie creators too. Like if somebody's looking at a Neil Gaiman project on Kickstarter, there is upsells and there's ways for them to actually then see the other indie projects of other creators as well. But the tools themselves have evolved to the point where I'd like to see it get a little more streamlined but it's definitely getting there. Like you could have Kickstarter with add-ons. Like say you missed a book on the last campaign you can add that on to your reward now, which we couldn't do before. So there's a lot of catching up, like especially with comic book series, if you want an older issue, you could add that right into your pledge and then you'll get everything sent to you at once. So things like that have made it a lot easier. Chris, what would you say is the, you know, the best cadence for doing Kickstarter's for like the same audience? Because that's something that I tend to see happen sometimes is especially if somebody's using Kickstarter as their primary financial engine that they tend to launch a lot of campaigns and there seems to be diminishing returns. It's a mixed bag. Really like it depends. Like if somebody, if you create like, let's say you create like three titles and one of them went gangbusters. There's no guarantee that the next two will. Maybe if it's a sequel to that one, but if it's a different one, because you know, people aren't just going to kind of back to back. They still have to like it even if they already like you. They may not back everything that you do. So it's still, there's a lot of other factors as well. Like what does the audience want? Is there certain things that work better on Kickstarter, work better on Indiegogo or Zoop? Like they all have kind of like their own little strengths and weaknesses, but I think the main thing is that the consumers gotten a little more savvy and can kind of search through things a little bit easier more to get to what they want. Yeah. It feels like the early buzz of Kickstarter was, oh, here's where I can find the prototypes, right? Yes. And what you're describing is more of Kickstarter as the Indie bookstore. Yes. Or the Indie record store. Yeah, right. How long do you think that stays that way? Well, I'm starting to see like, that it's kind of like getting more and more prevalent, especially when all of these other digital distribution areas come online. Like I said, I think there's global comics and drive through comics. I mean, the comicsology was great until Amazon bought it and kind of rolled it into Kindle. Now it's even hard to find on the Amazon website for comicsology. So that's another part of the purge that Amazon was going through. But what I'm seeing now is also like subscription models. Like you could go onto like a site that has all digital comics, just pay a fee for the month, read as much as you want. So you can literally just kind of browse and read, you know, everywhere, even if you're not even sure what you want. So I think the tools and accessibility have gotten better all the way around. And I see that actually continuing as things get a little more incorporated and streamlined, I think, and the audience gets a little more savvy on where to find things. I think everything will get smoother because there's still the fair amount of hiccups and people will be able to find what they want quicker. Yeah. So the bloom is not off the kickstarter Indiegogo Rose quite yet? No, not yet. I think it's more of an evolution, like, you know, what it can do and what it can be used for. And also there's more competition. Now it used to be kickstarter. Now it's not. There's Indiegogo, there's Game Found, and there's all these other crowdfunding sites for different things like comics and board games. And so I think that also helps because it brings awareness like, oh, I wasn't aware of like, you know, Zoop until I checked out kickstarter because the person that I like their work, they have another one over here. So I think it's the old rising tide, you know, raises all ships. So I think it's all good for sure. Good. Good for the boats. Good for all of us. Yes, good for the boats. All right, Justin, you've got a story about space. Of course. Germany's The Exploration Company will not wait for European rockets but is contracted with the Indian Space Research Organization, ISRO, to use its rockets to launch a reusable space capsule, Nix. The Exploration Company hopes to compete with SpaceX in the market for delivering cargo and people to the International Space Station and NASA's Plan Lunar Orbit Space Station. Yeah. What I love about this story is there are so many aspects that show how complex the space market is becoming because you've got an open market competitor for SpaceX in the Exploration Company and Nix, which is good. We want to have options to choose from. That's good for SpaceX as well as everybody else but also competition from government run organizations. It's Indian Space Research Organization is interesting in that it has its own private for-profit subsidiary that it runs and that's who the Exploration Company is working with. It's the, what is it called, the New Space India Limited Launch Services. So just so many different parts of space becoming normal, just looking like a normal business landscape. Mm-hmm. Now, what about this moon casino we've been hearing about for years? Who's building that? Well, we got to land on the moon again first. Yeah. All right. So a couple of years off still. Then we have to be able to get the slot machines. Yeah. Which is the whole, they are defined slot machine resources at the polar ice caps on the moon. They have settled on the tagline, hitting your eye like a big pizza pie. Nice. All right. Let's check out the mail bag on good day. Internet last week, we were talking about how quick and efficient Amazon is for delivery. Jim would like to point out that it isn't that way for everyone. Jim writes, getting something within two days, if not sooner, I'm sure is normal for some people, but I don't see it here in mid-coast Maine. We are about halfway between Portland and Bahaba. And when I order from them, it's a week. If I'm lucky, I might order something on Monday and get it Friday. Walmart's W plus is faster for me, but not by much. And I would say that our, our producer Amos who lives in Alaska probably seconds these emotions that, that not everywhere gets everything faster. Sarah Lane was, was talking to a friend of hers in Maine who said, Jim must be on an island because it's not that, you know, between Portland and Bahaba is, is hard for Amazon to get to unless you're off the coast. Then once you have to start putting stuff on boats to get it to the islands out there, it becomes more complicated. Yeah. More jet skis. Yeah. So the further north, the harder it gets until you like hit the North Pole pretty much. It's a north pole delivery times. Yes. They're the worst. Well, thanks to you both for being with us. Justin, Robert, young, what do you got going on these days that involves me? Well, you know, we got a little, I've been plugging this podcast for a few appearances now, but you were off gallivanting in Korea, but we are here to let everybody know that no little more has entered into its new season. And I got to tell you, it is can't miss. It's all about the mother of all demos and the technology that set into motion are past and present and possibly future of computing go ahead and get it right now. Know a little more on the podcast player of your choice. Yeah. And if you want to commercial free, you can get it directly. Patreon.com slash know a little more. This is the most fun I've had on a season of know a little more yet. They just keep getting more fun every time. And the mother of all demos is fascinating. I knew a little bit about it going into this season and I've just been amazed at how deep it goes and how many connections it shows. And this episode that just came out last week about hypertext wasn't even supposed to be part of this season, but it just it just materialized like, oh, it's it is also related. So I hope you all are enjoying this season as much as we are making it for you. Chris Mancini, what do you got going on? Speaking of crowdfunding, I have a new Kickstarter that launched literally today. So long ago and far away too. It's the sequel to long gone far away that I know. You got a while back at Tom and it's kind of like a basically a game of thrones meets clerks and Narnia where instead of British school children going through the the wardrobe, it's snarky asshole 30 year olds. So they kind of start making things worse while they're there. And the sequel is what happens when somebody had an adventure with the witch queen and now has a son. And that son is now because the time is different is 20 years older than him and he shows up in a comic con to try to kill him in a hotel room because he's mad at being abandoned. And so it's got, you know, it's really fun. I always love doing comedy and fantasy kind of together. So it's sword sorcery, dragons, zombies, necromancers and poor parenting altogether in the graphic novel. Hold the classics. Yes. So you can just go to Kickstarter.com and look up long gone far away too. Or you could just go to my website, white cat entertainment.com and click through there to we got 30 some days left, but don't wait. It starts today and there are some early bird rewards. So the sooner because everything runs on the algorithm, the sooner you back, the better. And then it, you know, pushes everything forward. Yeah, help Chris out, especially if you've done long ago and far away before, but even if it's new to you, come on. How can you resist that? Give it a roll. Yeah. And there's catch up tears too. You could get the old book with the new one too if you want. Right. Oh, you were just talking about that, that feature. That's, that's great. So you could, you could get in on the whole thing right now. Yes. Fantastic. Long ago and far away too. Patrons stick around for the extended show, good day internet. As Justin alluded to a moments ago, I have been in South Korea for a couple of weeks. So we're going to talk about my trip there and some of the technology I observed my experiences with using tech while traveling. So stick around for that. You can also catch the show live Monday through Friday, on Eastern 200 UTC. Find out more about that at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. Back tomorrow with Charlotte Henry talking about the UK's new free streaming TV service called freely. Talk to you then. This show is part of the frog pants network. Get more at frogpants.com. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.